Edited by Grzegorz Grochowski and Ryszard Nycz

writers in various cities – cities in Europe and
Latin America as well as in North America – to a crosswalk; when the stoplights
changed, they had one of two options, either to remain on this side and continue to
practice a modernist poetics of the epistemological dominant (as many of them
have done, of course) or to cross to a postmodernist poetics of the ontological
dominant. The streets were different, but the crossing was the same.5
There are three aspects to highlight here. Firstly, the metaphor of the
crosswalk implies that the postmodernist author is the

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia

: “Archetypal Faust has
all the elements of Western hubris and thus something of modern Everyman”
(Beicken 1999: 3). This is probably the main reason why the tale of Dr. Faustus
has been emulated and adapted by several western writers including Benet and
Washington Irwing. In order to show how the figure of Faustus inspired and
spoke to these writers on the other side of the Atlantic, I will first offer a short
analyis of Marlow’s play and then move on to show how the cautionary tale of
Dr. Faustus is rearticulated in theAmerican context through the examples of the

Edited by Rahilya Geybullayeva

Series:

pleasure support of this project in 1982 by a
Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship and by the In-
ternational Research and Exchanges Board. Furthermore, my work
benefited through participation in 1983 in the IREX Senior Scholar
Research Abroad Exchange Program with the Soviet Ministry of
Higher Education. Finally I take pleasure in thanking the Armenian
General Benevolent Union of America. Alex Manoogian Cultural
Fund for a grant to defray the typesetting and publishing costs of this
book.
Portions of Parts 1-3 have appeared in earlier form as

Chapter

Sonia I. Ketchian

religious obser-
vance. That argument, in turn, sheds light on the enigma of why, in the Andes,
llamas and alpacas were never milked.20
Another romantic inclination is the desire to naturalize the grotesque,
which explains my fascination with the Iberian pig as an indiscriminate scav-
enger in Latin America.21 Drawn to the unspeakable, I studied the history of
the spotted hyena in northeastern Africa where it is not just a scavenger, but
also has been an aggressive predator on humans.22 Conceptualizing those
recondite topics, as well as discussing in this book the hidden

Daniel Gade

, meaning ‘relief’. Nevertheless, many felt that the
changes of attitude did not last for long and that they would soon forget
60 Caroline Bynum has also criticised Turner, specifically his theory of liminality
and his notion of Dominant symbols. Bynum’s views imply rejection of the basic
assumptions in the theory of the rites of passage. See R.L. Grimes, ‘Ritual’,
Guide to Study of Religion, eds. W. Braun and R.T. McCutcheon (London:
Continuum, 2000), 266. See also C.W. Bynum, ‘Women’s Stories, Women’s
Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality

Series:

sea paths.]
Later, he will state that somehow the unity of the Peninsula was mainly due
to the fact that it is a ‘península que é como a miniatura dum continente’17
[a peninsula that is like a miniature continent]. That was what Strabo saw
as a bull’s skin, and which Saramago transformed into a ‘jangada de pedra’
[stone raft]; in fact, in his fiction, it is a stone raft that breaks away from the
continent, heads south, and settles between South AmericaandAfrica.18
In this particular case, it is also worth noting that the term ‘Iberian’
which we are using for

Edited by Adriana Mica, Arkadiusz Peisert and Jan Winczorek

Series:

Constitution. I cite two
founding fathers of the United States, the first modern, society-wide
democracy from which most western democracies originally took
their lead. The first is from the widely read pamphlet, Common
Sense by Thomas Paine, more influential than the Declaration of
Independence in turning theAmerican colonies from monarchy to-
ward democracy. The second is from the first and most powerful
chief executive of the US Republic, George Washington.
From Common Sense:
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave
little or no